by David M. Swindle
When and how did the country's most well-funded community foundation – endowed with $7.3 billion — embrace the baseless narratives of Islamist activists at CAIR and IR?
Please click here to sign a petition calling on the nation's largest community foundation to end its financial support for Islamist hate groups.
Silicon
Valley Community Fund CEO Emmett D. Carson (top center) and Vice
President for Strategic Initiatives & Grant-making Manuel J.
Santamaria (bottom left) are critical cogs in the U.S. Islamist
movement.
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Few
ideas induce more horror than the selling of human beings for sex
against their will. But the slave markets of the Islamic State are not
the only places on earth one can hear human trafficking rationalized.
Numerous Islamist institutions in the West frequently provide platforms
for speakers who defend this abominable practice by citing Islamic law.
And for years they have worked to infiltrate the mainstream of
philanthropy.
Since
January, the Middle East Forum has worked – first in private and then
in public – to persuade the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF)
to stop funding two such extremist organizations, the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Islamic Relief (IR), and instead
support reformist Muslim groups.
Both
CAIR and IR provide regular platforms to fundamentalist imams and
activists who justify concubinage and other brutal practices. Georgetown
academic and Islamist convert Jonathan Brown, who spoke at a 2013 CAIR fundraiser, came under criticism in February for a speech defending Shariah-sanctioned rape and sex slavery. Brown attended that CAIR event with Islamist activist Linda Sarsour, who has said of authors Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don't deserve to be women."
IR
also has a history of hosting imams who call for a return to the 7th
century. In 2016, Abdul Nasir Jangda spoke at an IR fundraising dinner
in Austin, Texas. Jangda, according to notes taken by one of his
students, defends the use of female sex slaves and claims, "Slavery in
Islam... is vastly different and superior morally and spiritually to the
atrocious, obscene, and vile Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade."
Most grant-making foundations would do everything they could not to be associated with such offensive ideas.
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One of Jangda's colleagues, Hussain Kamani, has also spoken at IR events. Kamani has said:
"If a person wishes to fulfil his desires, his common desires, there
are only two ways he can fulfill these desires where he will not be held
responsible for it. ... The first thing is that he fulfills his desires
with a spouse. The second thing is that he fulfills his desires with a
female slave that belongs to him."
One
would think that the SVCF, like most grant-making foundations, would do
everything it could not to be associated with such offensive ideas. Yet
our efforts to contact SVCF staff were stymied – vice president Manuel
J. Santamaria refused to talk with us.
A
mystery has hung over these pursuits: why has SVCF chosen to align
itself so tightly with Islamist groups? When and how did the country's
most well-funded community foundation – endowed with $7.3 billion — embrace the baseless narratives of Islamist activists at CAIR and IR?
The IIIT claims it is "dedicated to the revival and reform of Islamic thought."
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While
it's tempting to resort to ideological explanations, another angle
might also shed some light: appeasing the desires of its donors. One
high-dollar SVCF donor that may have helped to exert especially toxic
influence is the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which in 2015 provided SVCF with $500,000 in "program assistance" for a project called the "Global Policy Fund" according to its 990 form.
The
IIIT has a long history of extremist links. In 2008, federal
prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial introduced evidence that included IIIT as one of the Muslim Brotherhood's "list of our organizations and organizations of our friends."
A US Senate committee in 2002 noted
a connection between an IIIT employee and Al Qaeda's infamous leader:
"Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, personally provided [Osama] bin Laden
with the battery for the satellite phone prosecutors at the New York
trial of the East Africa Embassy bombers described as 'the phone bin
Laden and other will use to carry out their war against the United
States.'"
The IIIT also runs a religious training organization named the Fairfax Institute, where Brown serves as an "instructor." His speech defending slavery actually took place at an IIIT event.
The IIIT claims it is
"dedicated to the revival and reform of Islamic thought and its
methodology in order to enable the Ummah to deal effectively with
present challenges..."
IIIT-affiliated
scholars seek to cast Shariah-sanctioned slavery (left) as dramatically
different from the slavery of the antebellum American South (right).
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What
this means in practice is that the IIIT and its "instructors" regard
themselves as the theorists behind the growth of Islamism in the West,
who work to intellectually and morally justify certain aspects of
Shariah law and their implementation. Brown's specious claim that "the
Shariah understanding of slavery" is "not comparable at all" to slavery
as it existed in America.
There
is nothing mainstream or moderate about this rhetoric. The time has
come for SVCF CEO Emmett D. Carson and the others on the foundation's
leadership team to wake up to an unpleasant truth: under their
stewardship the organization has both accepted money from and given
money to groups that promote deeply hateful ideas.
SVCF must stop empowering the Islamists and start working with moderate Muslims instead.
David M. Swindle is the Coordinator of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. Follow him on Twitter at @DaveSwindle and Islamist Watch at @Islamist_Watch
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6751/how-sex-slavery-apologists-subverted-svcf
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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